Peter Costa: Frog sense

Monday

Jun 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMJun 30, 2008 at 3:31 AM

I was sitting on a beam in the back of my cottage on the lake as I wound a heavy-duty electrical cord around my arm. Suddenly I felt something move across my foot. I leapt into the air like a high jumper trying to qualify for a trip to Beijing and came down on the grass tangled in a web of orange wire. Next to my foot sat the culprit: a frog.

Peter Costa

I was sitting on a beam in the back of my cottage on the lake as I wound a heavy-duty electrical cord around my arm. Suddenly I felt something move across my foot. I leapt into the air like a high jumper trying to qualify for a trip to Beijing and came down on the grass tangled in a web of orange wire. Next to my foot sat the culprit: a frog.

He was as big as my fist and looked at me with those funny froggy eyes as if to inquire what I was doing on his turf. The frog was brown camouflage-colored and could very well have participated in stealth maneuvers in Desert Storm. I decided to call him Private First Class Frog – first class because of his well-turned-out light brown uniform and because of his soldier straight demeanor.

After some scapula-straining Houdini-like movements, I managed to free myself from the electrical cord and resume my seat on the beam. The frog didn’t move but just stared up at me like a doorstop.

“You gave me quite a scare, Private,” I said. The frog still sat motionless about three inches from my foot.

Wild things easily scare me. I run away from garden snakes, turkey vultures, hornets and all manners of aquatic things – especially catfish. A horned pout once stung me when I was a kid and to this day I won’t go wading in the lake late at night when the catfish are patrolling the bottom.

And while I don’t run away from frogs, I don’t like the green slimy ones who have the perhaps undeserved reputation of causing warts and LSD-like hallucinations if their sliminess is somehow accidentally ingested.

The frog jumped a few inches. It wasn’t an energetic leap and it was slightly off balance. as if he were jumping off a miniature barstool.

The wind was rising. It was now blowing from the southeast and there was a chop on the water. Soon it would be raining. Pvt. First Class Frog sensed the change in the atmosphere and its body began to expand and contract in a frog’s version of CPR.

I looked up at the water and started talking quietly to my soldier friend about the recession, growing joblessness, the scary volatile market and the bad health of my friends.

“I know it’s not easy being green, Private, but it must be even harder being brown. What do you do if you need a new knee and can’t jump as high as you used to? What is a frog’s out-of-network co-pay?”

The frog turned and sat with its back to me.
“That’s no way to face the world’s problems, Private.”

Raindrops fell and hit the leaves on the trees with slight slaps. The frog turned once again and looked up at me for a long while. The rain increased and a downdraft of wind churned up the lake.

I looked at the ground but Pvt. First Class Frog was nowhere to be seen. Where do frogs go when it squalls?

I was starting to get wet and decided I had better follow the private’s example and beat a retreat. Somehow, I felt better about the world. I hoped the private did too.

Peter Costa is a senior editor with Community Newspaper Company. His book, “CostaLiving: Laughing through Life,” a collection of his humor columns, is available at amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble bookstores.

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